


Where The Wild Things Are

by 4376111



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Gore, Had this unfinished for a while, Law the Pint Sized Rage Machine, sort of a different take on daemons, vultures
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:27:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25523599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/4376111/pseuds/4376111
Summary: When he was young, Law had always assumed Leisha would settle as a cat. Father had a cat and mother came from a whole line of felines and feline-adjacents. They had tested the waters with an Alabastan Mau for about a week, but no matter how nice curling up in a sunlit windowsill was, it just never felt right.Now they're scavengers, nature's opportunists. He survived where no one else did and no matter what it takes, he is going to stay that way until the world pays for what it has taken from him.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 22





	1. Miasma

**Author's Note:**

> So I was thinking about daemons and AUs like 2 years ago and then I had this image of little Law sneaking out of Flevance in the corpse cart and trying to disguise his demon as a scavenger. I considered rats at first, but instead I chose Ruppell's Griffon Vulture for the sheer drama, (I like birds ok). Leisha definitely wouldn't have been found naturally in the North Blue, but its also One Piece so who tf is gonna question it. The whole corpse cart thing is a bit of an extrapolation from canon but the world needs more small, pre-Doffy Law in it. 
> 
> Anyways, I've had this baby in my notes app for actual years but I finally got around to fixing it up a bit and am working on fleshing out the rest a bit even as I post this. Hope you enjoy!

There is an extraordinary amount of difference between someone when they are dying and when they are already dead. The most obvious, of course, being the smell and the fact that they are no longer alive.

Law is no stranger to the sordidity of such matters. His parents, hardworking and lovely as they had been, were doctors and not fraught with much concern for the gruesomeness of the occupation. He had been cleaning bedpans and helping push trolleys down to the morgue since he was old enough to peek over his father’s desk. The past few months certainly didn’t seek to instill any sort of latent aversion to gore either, save for what trauma he might sustain if he managed to live long enough to worry about such things.

Living- what an irony there is in that. For all his beating heart and reaching mind, Law could swear he had left that part of him, the very life of him, back at Lami’s bedside at the start of summer. He sustained as merely a walking corpse, fueled by rage and vengeance and a morbid curiosity towards just how far he could go, pushing his limits and beating back the reaper with a stick. Different from the bodies that piled the cart and blocked him in, only in the way that he still woke that morning just like the last. Opened his eyes to see nothing in the dark, but to know himself saturated his own filth, dead appendages jostling and jiggling him around like so many groceries brought home slightly bruised. Fleshy and soft, but roiling insistently at demands of his empty stomach.

If there were any bile left in him, Law would have expelled it at the thought. For a moment, his throat is caught seizing in the memory of thick smoke and the choking, nauseatingly appetizing stench of cooking meat that had hailed his departure from the war-torn ruins of his hometown. That had been three days ago, by count only of his waking and sipping greedily from the canteen smuggled in his hat. Three nights counted as when the stench of rotten blood and gut became too much and he once again was lost to the clutches of unconsciousness.

Sleep, a saving grace just as much as a hated interloper on his quest and determination. Inconvenient as always, but in all fairness, the most interesting consumer of his time.

At some point his eyes had expanded in the dark enough to see distortions of the slackened face above him, held up by broken rifles skewered through the upper chest cavity. A hastily made and gruesome, yet efficient tent.

For the entire duration of Mrs.Crossley’s care at his father’s hospital, Law can say quite certainly that none but perhaps her closest family ever witnessed the woman’s spine at any posture but ramrod straight and proper, her face anything but a textbook example of convoluted social niceties and suppression. 

Despite his initial hesitation on the matter, the respect that Law had gained for the woman was a result of the intelligent gleam in her eyes. Eyes that saw much more than her pursed lips and stiff shoulders would have you to believe. Unlike many of the patients in those last weeks, Mrs.Crossley had full understanding of her own looming mortality, and decided she would rather go with dignity despite it all.

Now, Mrs.Crossley’s expression is slack, unguarded with her head slumped at a queasy angle. Her eyes have been pecked out and only shadowed pits remain. They stare blankly at him, dull, dumb, and squirming with the uneasy suggestion of either maggots or Law’s own morbid hallucinations.

He does not allow himself to feel anything but burning rage at the sight, else he might invite the rats to come and feast. The misery has been humbling like that, enduring him always to the incessant and downward spiral of terrible things that could still be so much worse.

He stares straight ahead, wishing only to see the stars, even if just one last time.

He feels so very empty, stretched thin with Leisha so out of reach. She circles above, dodging potshots taken by bored guards and pretending that she’d like nothing more than to bury her head in the carcasses that surround Law, tearing and ripping and feasting on kidneys like the real buzzards that circle low. The lie is in the fact that it is not the blood of corpses which she craves, but the beating hearts of heartless men and their companion souls.

The next bump tosses the wagon enough to send the bodies tumbling around, and Law is once again alone in the dark.

She crows once and he shuts his eyes tight and focuses on his rage once more.

The whole North Blue, no the  _ whole world _ will burn for this, he swears.

  
  


\---

The only reason Law knows that he sleeps is because he wakes up choking on smoke and seeing Lami seared across his retinas. She is so small in the closet, even while clutching Lucaliamo to her chest. So small that she could hide so thoroughly in the ashes and ruins his dream-self sifted through, her remains never to be found. 

In his dreamscape there was only a sea of scorched wood and the knowledge that she went willingly into the closet, and he left her burning to her death.

Her eyes haunt him, as do those of Lucaliamo, still in his strange South-Blue Quoll form that she had seen in class and had been so excited to show him. 

They probably died from smoke inhalation. He felt that viscerally just as he tried so hard not to cough, to stay still while strange hands gripped his limbs and smog choked his lungs. He had swallowed down the grimy air until the rattles of wheels on broken pavement could cover the sounds of his upheaval.

  
  


\---

When they reach the outskirts of the port town, the men who brought the bodies go to have a drink. The incinerator is a looming monster in the outskirts, and there’s a tension in the air that he hasn’t quite managed to shake.

Law overhears the exchange with baited breath. Coins changing hands, the cart being unhitched in turn for an empty one. New horses are saddled to make the next journey and others are sent to go back for the next batch. The weary ones are unbridled and go to rest in stalls that wait for them with open doors.

The new drivers are talkative, loose-lipped with their complaints. They complain about family, women, comrades, and mead. They complain about how the dump is docking them extra pay because they can’t burn as much, and about all the bodies taking up pyre space. They are not guards but drivers, used to inorganic cargo, and the difference is obvious in the way their eyes don’t look back once, not even when Law’s shaky feet skim the dirt of the road. He throws himself into the ditch and almost breaks both his legs.

He just lies there for a moment and tries to catch his breath, quiet as Leisha touches down slowly. She is hesitant and elegant and her head is bare enough that he knows the rest of the world would think her ugly. He sees this, sees the blood on her beak, the fuzzy hook of her neck, the beginning of spots on her feathers and thinks not for what others might see. They are ugly. Beautifully, terribly so. They are survivors, adapted for the circumstance life gave them, and there is no one else who lived to see it. No one left on the planet whose opinion matters to them.

The smell of burning flesh and great pillars of smoke are the last Law sees of the mainland before he stows away on a garbage-ship and never comes back.

Spider Miles is a quite literal wasteland, but Law is a scavenger and he makes due.


	2. Hippocrates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Law was raised by doctors and memorized the hippocratic oath as soon as he knew the alphabet. The worst thing in his mind is not the killing part, it’s the doing harm part. Beyond any desire for death and destruction, he just wants to do his worst

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gave me so much trouble! I entirely rewrote it a solid 3 or 4 times going back and forth between not wanting to extrapolate too much from canon and pretty much tossing canon out the window, and still am not so sure. Hopefully y’all like it, I think I found a decent balance in here somewhere.

The sun beats down on him during the afternoons but it’s still so much better than the hazy white. Pale like someone removed the sky and replaced it with the spots that crawl slowly over skin.

When his eyes finally adjust to the muggy air and the smog, Law climbs up on the shell of an old rusted-out ship and watches the few miserable souls pick along the oily beaches like shipwrecked sailors. 

It surprises him at first, that there are people in the ruins of Spider Miles. They’re scavengers of the wretched sort, all twisted up with greed and lust and these single minded instincts. Skittering across the terrain like bugs from a stick. Just like him in that they’re made unpredictable with desperation, and consistent in that they care only for their own survival. The imagined threat of strangers’ eyes raises the hair on the back of his neck. They spare no mind for him, but Law was not expecting them and that in itself is unsettling. 

Their closeness, as relative to his ramshackle sleeping place, bothers him less than it probably should, and less than would be reasonably accepted given his current state of wariness. Less than it would last week at least, but last week was a different lifetime altogether. It doesn’t matter though, he can’t change the way things are and he falls asleep at night to the sound of distant shuffling in the trash heaps.

If they try and start something, Leisha’ll rip their throats out, and if that doesn’t work, he’s still got the grenades he tied under his shirt back in Flevance. 

The grenades are probably both unstable and extremely dangerous, like everything else in his extended existence is shaping up to be, but that’s alright. It admittedly gives him a bit of a thrill, although he tries not to think about that fact too hard. Overall they’re just a much better option than the slow, soul-sapping death he’ll face soon enough. 

That’s something he has now- options. Refreshing really, a taste of home in the strangeness, and all the better if they’ll take a chunk of the world with him when he goes.

They’re the only keepsake that doesn’t confuse him with all the associated feelings and variations of hurt. Flevance, as he remembers her; beautiful and pale, war-torn rubble. Even his hat holds her as a tainted memory, but the only thing the grenades make him feel is poison-sweet rage. Rage, at least, feels good. 

Maybe someday he’ll find one of the ramshackle civilizations out here and bomb it to the ground. Maybe, but probably not. This wasteland may be worthy of being called somebody’s home, but it’s trash nonetheless. He wants to tear down more than that else he’d just be another dead body burning in the ruins. Law definitively does not try and wonder where they came from, (and if it was anywhere like Flevance), to find a haven in a purgatory such as this.

It doesn’t matter though. Not yet at least, for now he is too weak and malnourished and his rage is still just a spark. 

Maybe someday, but for now he stagnates under the shell of a ferry and sleeps silent like the dead.

—-

Law is halfway to starvation when a man tries to steal from him. He is much taller than Law, old or grey with stress, and slinks low to the ground as he circles the boy.

“I’m sorry kid,” the man says, voice ragged with disuse and breath heavy like smoke, “nothing personal, y’know, just need those,” he steps closer, swaying a bit as he gestures to Law’s grenades. A snake rears up from the dirt at his side, hissing like spittle flying from a rabid dog. “Gotta get that bastard, you see, gotta blow his whole operation apart.”

Law considers the man for a moment, grasping for some sort of clarity. The man’s eyes are distant and wild and nothing like anyone’s he’s seen before. Not even Flevance had this sort of drawn out hysteria, rather a panic that hit fast and hard. He grips one of his grenades, dirty nails scraping against the metal grooves. He blinks through his exhaustion to try and follow the bunching of the snake’s muscles with his eyes.

“... gonna get that fucker, Doflamingo…” the man mumbles, licking his chapped lips once more. His eyes are darting now, faster than Law can keep track of.

Leisha trills once.

The man screams shrill and high pitched. Only for an instant, but louder than the screeching of the broken bottle as it drags along the tin sheet metal in his plight to get away. His leg has little give under the glass, bony and wiry with ragged muscle, and the shards crunch and grind into a finer sand with every jerky movement. There is a heavy-iron smell in the air and the man leaves a trail of blood behind, spurting sporadically from his femoral artery. Law doesn’t pursue. The thing he craves is not the killing, it’s the doing harm. If the man dies it’s his own mistake, for not considering death as a possibility in the first place. He may have been desperate, but Law is too.

The name Doflamingo sparks a curiosity though. Maybe if he survives the night he’ll go looking in the morning.  
\---

The town he finds is small and ramshackle, but they don’t look twice at his ragged clothes and hollow cheeks. They are wary of his spots, but only because he is new and strange and they don’t quite trust him yet. Still, Law leaves his grenades behind (he’s not dying in this place), and drags a tarp of scavenged weapons and other knick knacks to barter for his safety and a piece of dry bread.

A man who used to be a pirate tells him that Doflamingo may someday conquer the North Blue. A woman spooning soup calls him a festering rot, blight upon the seas. A man with a one-eyed calico cat on his shoulder hisses and tells Law to mind his own. That’s all a dime a dozen but, they call it a family.

When he finally straps on his grenades and makes the trek to their base, Law decides that Donquixote Doflamingo has a name that sounds like that of a daemon but no daemon in sight. He is the ticket to vengeance and also the tallest man that Law has ever seen.  
\---

A BRIEF INTERLUDE:

Everyone takes one look at Doffy and makes assumptions.  
“Where is she?” They ask, “What is she?” they rarely do.  
“Not here,” he lies, should he care enough to do so. More often than not, he just kills them for their insolence and continues on unhindered by their superstition.

Doffy loves it, the assumptions they make, the curiosity that follows in his wake. Twisting sprouts of questions that he knows will grow and grow and never know the answer.  
His favorite theory is that he killed her. He loves the disparity, the desolation, the drama.

The most common is that she’s a flamingo. Less original, very obvious, not so much his style.

Rocinante probably assumes he’s banished her like their forefathers did, no longer human and without a soul. Above any creature, gods in their own right. The celestial daemons can be anything, he knows. They can be birds or fish or humans they’ve never even seen. They can be anything because the second they can’t, they are dismissed from duty. It is… a bit too barbaric for Doffy’s taste. The dragons know naught of bonds, only the bondage of their own ignorance.

Doffy laughs sometimes at the more outrageous claims, but still he never speaks her name. Above all however, he never allows them to see the place between his shoulder blades where a redback spider has spun her careful web.

\---

He should have expected it. The second Law saw those kohl-like feathers, the painted grin and the hooked beak, looming over the shoulder of a man just as tall as Doflamingo, a seven foot monstrosity. He shouldn’t have been fooled by the clumsiness, the trip that left his guard down.

He shouldn’t have been surprised when he felt sharp talons catch around Leisha’s still painfully small and scrawny frame, dragging her up, up, upwards. He’s felt this strain before, the stretch of hurtling thousands of feet in the air. It isn’t quite the same for birds like Leisha though, who fly naturally at the highest altitude besides the abnormalities of the Grand Line. Still, he tenses at the double swooping in his stomach as he too is being flung from the window.

The bonebreaker drop, he knows they call it, and he knows that were she not the way she is– were she a flesh and bone creature with no wings to catch her fall– Leisha would have been lying broken in so many pieces across the rusted shell of a fishing boat, split open to let the Lammergeier feast on her marrow.

But because she is not any of those things, he does not expect it. He suspects that it will be his marrow on the line from this point out; after all he is faced with a dangerous man, a Lamb Stealer, with a particular distaste for children. 

They are going to kill this man, Law decides in that moment. They’re gonna rip his goddamn guts out and kill this man before he gets the chance to kill them.

It isn’t until later on that he thinks, ‘oh’ and realizes that the bone-eating isn’t the part he should have been worried about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jeez, wish I could find the 99% of the dialogue that just banished itself somewhere between my brain and the final version. 
> 
> Some notes:
> 
> I wanted to stick with names that sort of matched their counterpart’s theme (like Leisha&Law and Lucialliamo&Lami)
> 
> For Cora’s daemon I wanted to go more along the lines of ‘7 ft tall with clown makeup and covered in feathers’ because I love the juxtaposition of this absolute goofy mess of a man and the ruthless Corazon that got him his reputation under Doffy. 
> 
> Thus, Trifaldi was born. She’s a vulture too (I know I know, but this was pretty much the only reason I wanted to continue this fic), but she’s a Bearded Vulture and I recommend looking up a picture because that should explain my initial thought process well enough. I wanted this to stay away from the more traditional daemon forms anyways and the child-stealing legends were just the icing on the cake. As for the name; the Donquioxte naming scheme led me to Countess Trifaldi, “Afflicted by her beard” indeed
> 
> For Doffy’s I figure I already have two birds and despite the obvious, he doesn’t really act like a flamingo. I mean, I love flamingo doffy and I don’t know much about Flamingoes, but he’s got strings and lives in a place literally called spider miles. I wanted to go with the bird eating spider for the naming irony, but research on their webs came up lackluster so instead we got the redback for web-strength and the red glasses

**Author's Note:**

> I'm actually finishing this, (even though chapter one is going up first), for once, which is kinda hype. Hope y'all enjoyed and are staying safe in these trying times


End file.
